Hotmail Bhatia back in business

First plan - VoiFi Beta, an IM service and a P2P telephony software that offers calls to India for Re 1.

Sabeer Bhatia is re-booting himself after the resounding flop of Arzoo.com, the on-line portal which he set up after selling off Hotmail. This time, it is not a single product or technology that he is betting on. A slew of offerings is slated to be rolled out over a period of time.

The entrepreneur expects the new offerings to have "greater value" than Hotmail, the free e-mail service that he had started and later sold to Microsoft for $400 million.

The first of the initiatives, VoiFi Beta, is an instant messaging (IM) service and a peer-to-peer telephony software that also offers calls for Re 1 from any part of the world to India.

The software has gaming content like "War Zones", "Snakes and Ladders", "Tic-Tac-Toe" and a version of the Indian poker called "Teen Patti", enabling users to play games while on IM or voice calls.

The software, developed in India, was launched today. A Mumbai-based subsidiary of Bhatia's US company VoiFi Technology Corporation, that was set up in 2004, has been working on it for the last 18 months.

"Entertainment has a great opportunity in the country, and this is what is going to be the differentiator considering there are a number of other VoIP providers like Skype, Yahoo, MSN and GoogleTalk," Bhatia told Business Standard.

The second project will help speed up Hotmail. At present, Hotmail is registering a lot of user complaints, the major among them being slow response. The mail service provider has over 250 million users, making it the largest in the world.

Bhatia has written a software to make Hotmail "hot" again, and this can be downloaded free from the web. "My services are always free, and I make my money from the advertisement revenue," he said. The new product will be launched next week.

Working on yet another project, Bhatia will look at rolling out a software to increase the capacity of Hotmail.

In India, it is allocated a storage space of around 4 MB, while users in the US get around 2 GB. Arzoo.com will also be relaunched on the lines of Expedia, a portal providing travel services.